Post Your Suggestions for Book Club Here

I want to make this the home base for posting your book suggestions for our new book club--Creatio Ex Nihilo (or whatever else someone wants to change it to). Please add anything you want or just brainstorm in the comment section of this post.

Here are a couple of ideas from me. I like the idea of occasionally doing themes or topics to mix it up from just normally doing individual titles. This would be similar to us doing a different director for each month, although the themes/topics could take place over a period longer than a month.

For instance, we could do a graphic novels section, reading a few graphic novels that people suggest or hitting all of the important, landmark ones (Watchmen, From Hell, whatever else, I don't really know the medium that well). We could do biographies, certain types of nonfiction, sci-fi books, books by certain authors, a topic, such as adultery, genres like poetry, epics, drama, etc., etc. etc.

One thing I'm interested doing in the future (farther into it, when people have some titles under their belt and can handle some of these more difficult suggestions for this topic) is doing a segment about the history of American literature. I think, us being American and hopefully interested in learning more about our culture, this would be particularly instructive and also a good journey for us to have together as a group. Because our nation is pretty young, we could tackle this important topic in as little as 10-15 books. So that would take a few months, but not that many. This is what I had in mind as the major books/authors of American literary history (in chronological order): start with the writings of Emerson, who influenced all of those who came immediately after him and helped start the "American Renaissance" of the middle of the 19th century; move onto his novelistic predecessors in New England, Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter) and Herman Melville (Moby-Dick); then tackle the two major poets of our country, Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass) and Emily Dickinson (some selected poetry by her); then read Walden and perhaps some other selected essays of Henry David Thoreau; skip ahead a few decades to Mark Twain's Huck Finn (Ernest Hemingway, himself one of America's most influential writers, said that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huck Finn"); read a book or two by Henry James, often considered America's finest novelist (a fight he wages with William Faulkner); then move onto the Modernists of the 20th century, with William Faulkner (we'd read his two biggest novels, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying), Ernest Hemingway (read a smattering of his short stories, which are his true legacy, and perhaps The Sun Also Rises, his greatest novel), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby); then we'd hit the essential post-WWII novel, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man; and finally move onto the greatest writers who are still alive, Philip Roth (we would have to pick a book by him, since he has several contenders), Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, which is considered the best novel by an American author still alive), and Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow...be ready for a challenge and craziness). And that's it. That's only about 12 novels, with some poetry and essays thrown in, to cover the literary history of our country, which is something I think we should all learn about eventually, and our book club is the best way to do this. This is a long-term project, though, but I think when we do do it, we should do it all the way through, since you can learn about the themes that weave their way through our cultural history and see how the authors influenced each other. Someone, I forget who, said that culture is really the great minds of history having a dialogue with each other, and this would be our chance to listen in and try to learn something from what they have to say, and I think we undoubtedly can.

Jim had suggested that we read two books by Philip K. Dick, master of science fiction. One was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and I forget the name of the others. This would be a good way to break up the Dark Tower series, which is rather lengthy, but is the first thing we are scheduled to read.

Rie suggested that we actually have scheduled meetings in person so that we have deadlines for our reading. I think this is a good idea, since otherwise people will lag indefinitely. We don't have to match the crazy pace of college literature courses, which I believe rush too much over the greatest works in history just to get as many titles as possible on the syllabus, but I think we should set at least a steady clip, since it's infinitely better to read novels in bigger chunks then to read only snippets here and there before we go to bed or on the way to work in the morning on the subway. You can't really appreciate great work unless you dive headfirst into it, which means spending more time with the authors. Jim and other people who aren't around can be broadcasted into our meetings via webcam or other sexy devices.

Another suggestion I have is that we tackle the current "it books"--The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. I am forever out of touch with what's popular at the moment, and I'd like to correct that. These movies are coming to theaters in the future, with Daniel Craig and others, so hopefully we can read them before the movies come out. They are quick-paced thrillers, so no one should have any problem with these.

I'll post some other suggestions later.

--Edward